Justice

The NDP Leader is calling on government to address the urgent situation in our province’s correctional facilities. There have been three inmate deaths in correctional facilities, two at the Clarenville Correctional Centre for Women and one at Her Majesty's Penitentiary, in the last three months, and four in the past year.

Recent events surrounding the incarceration of an Inuk protester are the latest evidence to that the province’s justice system is not working for all the province residents, says NDP Justice Critic Gerry Rogers (MHA, St. John’s Centre). She says government must undertake a review of how the provincial justice system interacts with indigenous people.

As this province struggles with increasingly severe addictions issues, NDP Justice Critic Gerry Rogers (MHA, St. John’s Centre) says the policies and procedures at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary and other corrections facilities are not adequate. “Without proper addictions rehab programming and schooling we are warehousing not rehabilitating,” she said today.

Today in the House of Assembly, NDP MHAs continued efforts to get government to respond to questions about the conflict of interest controversy swirling around the former top public servant in the province. Bernard Coffey was conducting legal actions against public bodies while holding the position of Clerk of the Executive Council.

The NDP Critic for Justice and the Status of Women says that while the province’s new abortion buffer zone legislation doesn’t go quite as far as she would have liked, she is delighted to see that government kept its promise and included protection for all employees of abortion clinics in the regulations.

NDP Justice Critic Gerry Rogers (MHA, St. John’s Centre) today acknowledged the release of five reports related to the investigation of the shooting of Mr. Donald Dunphy, calling the release “an important step as we move forward towards understanding what happened at Mr. Dunphy’s house that day in April 2015.”